Cat treats with a difference -- another alternative menu recipe for cats

Makena and Manu get homemade cat treats every day...in fact, they've come to expect these. Makena pokes her head into the fridge every night and points to the container I keep these jerky treats in. Her favorite is chicken hearts, which are loaded with nutrients that every kitty needs.

Dried meat treats are easy to make for your cats. All you need is a dehydrator. Here, I've tossed organic chicken hearts on one of the trays. You can load up multiple trays at once with different things if you wish or just dehydrate a single tray. I plug in the dehydrator, let it dehydrate for about 7 hours and then store in a container in the fridge.

It's best to do small amounts since there are no preservatives or added to these treats and they will only last a few days. Watch out for any potential mould that may develop and if that happens, just toss them.

You can experiment to see what your cat likes. Fish skins are popular here (and those will keep outside the fridge for more than a few days) as are chicken thighs, salmon, bits of lamb or goat pieces. Of course I get pieces of meat without the bone for dehydrating purposes.

FDA suspends temporary emergency permit of pet food company

http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/NewsEvents/CVMUpdates/ucm166265.htm

Interesting. Maybe in the age of Obama the FDA's two staffers in the Centre for Veterinary Medicine (yes there are only two people working in that department) feel emboldened enough to start holding pet food companies to account.

That's doesn't change the fact that there are many regulatory changes and legal changes needed to reign the industry in. Governments in Canada and the US need the power to issue product recalls. Shockingly there is nothing in the law in either country that allows either government to do this.

Tainted pet food supplier to plead guilty

Two stories I got in my google alerts this morning. Note that the importers were an American firm doing business with China, a critical fact often unreported or under-reported in the many stories about this case.

Tainted pet food suppliers to plead guilty/

Suppliers knowlingly imported tainted pet food/

The Feline Nutrition Society

Here's a new site created by bloggers who have been reading and sharing information about correct nutrition for our beloved feline companions. Many of the links are ones that I have on this blog so it's good to see that the truth about feline nutrition is being distributed widely.

The Feline Nutrition Society/ stated mission is to advocate for raw feeding for cats.

Irradiated cat food banned in Australia

Canadian irradiated cat food banned in Australia

So where's the Canadian government on this issue? It was Australia that discovered that this particular product, imported from Canada, was irradiated. But once again, simply calling a halt to what is considered a controversial practice -- sterilizing cat food -- isn't the solution either.

These species-inappropriate products just need to be removed from the market entirely. After all, if it can be done with Vioxx (where thousands of people died) it can be done with cat food too.

The recalls continue

What did the settlement in the Menu Foods lawsuit resolve? Here's the latest recall. Really, the PFI cannot be trusted to produce products that are safe and healthy for a cat to consume. With the lack of effective government legislation worldwide on the pet food issue, the only solution cat guardians have is to take matters into their own hands and make their own food.

No cat should ever eat any form of dry food and the ongoing recalls just prove this point. And it's not just a matter of excessive zinc or potassium, as the company is claiming either. All dry cat food is "species inappropriate" since it is composed mainly of grain and made by the process of high heat processing and extrusion. Cats, as obligate carnivores, cannot tolerate carbohydrates.

A list of the products being recalled can be found here:
Recall of Nutro products

Winn Foundation hires 2 Hills vets to do study on raw diets

http://www.winnfelinehealth.org/Pages/WinnGrants2009p2.html/

Well well well....so the PFI is not content to totally dominate market share in the global pet food market. Now two veterinarians closely affiliated with Hills Pet Nutrition have been hired to carry out a study on raw diets for cats. How interesting that they choose to study kittens. Geez that was my inspiration for starting this blog! I thought it would be a "case study in action" to start my new kitten, Makena, on a raw diet and to post the results on this blog.

Good grief! Do we really need a study to prove that cats are obligate carnivores? Don't these people even watch all those documentaries on felines in Africa on the Discovery channel? Running tests to prove that cats are better off eating meat? What is the real motive of this study? Will they skew the results of whatever formulation they come up with to prove that cats should not eat raw meat?

The burden of proof really lies with the veterinarians and multinational corporations who are formulating species-inappropriate diets -- diets for cats that are NOT what Mother Nature intended. Do we need a study to prove that the earth is not flat? Really. "Complete and balanced" -- well, as we know from the recalls and from the many sites dedicated to feline illnesses such as FD, commercial pet food is anything BUT "complete and balanced".

Dr. Claudia Kirk, as some of you may remember, was the PFI apologist who appeared on the panel before the Congressional Investigation into the tainted pet food scandal in 2007.

What exactly will they be doing in this study? Will they screw up the formulations in order to "prove" raw diets for cats are bad? So-called "results-oriented science"?

I've emailed the Winn Foundation posing these very questions. No response to my email.